SUNDAYS WITH SHARON: Not Missing The Dance

I’ve heard some beautiful recordings of this song. Garth Brooks recorded it. So have many others. I’ve had this song sung to me live, once on stage, recorded for me, dedicated to me on a radio station once. It’s a song that means a lot to me for a lot of reasons. Old boyfriends, new friends, people I’ve loved and love still, people who I knew that have passed on, people I loved who were killed in battle, or at home fighting the fight at home.

Just like the words say, “Our lives are better left to chance, I could have missed the pain, but I’d have had to miss the dance,” our colorful stories are made up of good days and bad days. Strung together like multi-colored beads in a glass necklace, or Christmas twinkle lights, chapters of a book that holds our attention, the whispered words of love in a dark night, or memories of those loved and lost, loved and gone away, except for our memory. And we are better for it, right? Some pain, yes, but better for it.

Another haunting song I love by Jimmy Webb, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, I heard again about a year ago at a Pat Metheney concert. Talking about love, love found, love lost, and the journey to and from love. Beautiful, painful, like life itself. Who will forget the wonderful voice of Glen Campbell, now silent, singing this beautiful song.

Experience makes us the people we are, gives us the stories of love and pain, the yearning for something more miraculous than our ordinary lives. Like Liam Neesom’s child says in Love Actually, “Let’s go get the shit kicked out of us (by love).” Drunk on love, or drunk on the creating the fantasy of love – it’s all the same. Drunk on writing is the same as living the experience. I travel all the places my heroes and heroines travel, feel the warmth of arms around me, the love I get to feel and express without holding back. And yes, there’s pain too along the way sometimes.

You and I get to dance together for as long as we wish. There is no beginning and no ending. Our capacity expands the more we fall into the twinkling fantasy of what love could be like in it’s perfect, most intense form. We’re hopeless romantics, you and I. We live in the possibility, in the moment that is miraculous and pure.

And the pain? Well, that’s the dance, isn’t it? The backdrop for all the miracles that happen. When things hurt the most, especially when someone you love is hurting, all the more reason to cover ourselves in the fantasy of a good love story that heals all. I still believe in love, though I’ve been hurt. I still believe I get richer, deeper and stronger every day I live.

Because I’m dancing. I’m still here. I’m still dancing.